Cost Effective Surface Penetrating Radar Device for Humanitarian Demining

A consortium of European companies and universities are collaborating on an EC supported project to develop a novel hand-held Surface Penetrating Radar (SPR) device which is able to detect Anti-Personnel Landmines (APLs). The sensor utilises a new Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar principle based on Maximal Length Binary Sequence (MLBS) techniques, already successfully tested in acoustic wide band devices. A 6 element multi-static linear antenna array has been designed to fully exploit the radar technology. The array consists of unique planar bow-tie elements with distributed resistive loading. The data processing techniques investigated include the study of inverse problems, adapted to extract features of the reflecting targets, and to eliminate non-target related influences such as antenna and soil characteristics. Pseudotomographic methods extract measurements of the size and shape of the reflectors. This information is combined in a robust target classification algorithm. Acoustic impulse time-of-flight techniques are being used to register the movement of the antenna array in the X-Y plane. In this paper we present an overview of the key principles and techniques which are being exploited in the development of the device.